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Posts Tagged ‘tagging’
Can online help show “read wear?”
I’ve been re-reading Jakob Nielson’s Participation Inequality essay on useit.com, and the suggestion to some how show wear marks on content struck me this evening for some reason. I guess it’s because I’ve been working on Drupal recently, and discovered that Drupal documentation contains site recipies in the Drupal Handbook. What a nifty idea. Stick with me, these two concepts are related through a recipe and cookbook angle.
Part of Jakob’s treatise on inequal participation in online communities is that you can do little to overcome the typical contribution stats of 90-9-1, although one of the suggestions is to make participation so easy that you don’t even know you’re contributing. Case in point - Amazon’s “people who bought this book, bought these other books” recommendations. Sounds like the easiest contribution ever - data mining and analyzing, then giving the data back to the shopper in an understandable format.
Jakob says, “Will Hill coined the term read wear for this type of effect: the simple activity of reading (or using) something will “wear” it down and thus leave its marks — just like a cookbook will automatically fall open to the recipe you prepare the most.”
What are some similar examples of displaying read wear from the online help or user assistance world? The first example that comes to my mind is a wiki’s “most active pages” feature that shows the page with the most edits. However, the page with the most edits may be more controversial than truthful, so the most popular pages would be more useful than touting pages most active.
How else can you show read wear on a website? You could also show the most searched-for terms when the user searches. Concepts may be more easily connected when you understand what others were searching for.
Or, rather than showing search terms, show the most recently viewed knowledgebase articles or most popular articles. I know I’ve found that useful in the past when searching through BMC Software’s rich knowledge base.
Just like CNN and other news sites offer a listing of the most emailed stories per hour, you could show the most emailed online help topics if your system offers the ability to email topics.
The ability to rate an article is included in many online help systems, and exposing the ratings to the reader would help in determining how “well-worn” a help topic is.
Tag clouds can display read wear as well, as I just realized while looking at the Wordpress FAQ starting page - tonight, the largest tag is “Images.”
I’ve distilled it down to popularity, time spent on the page, rating on a page, and number of edits from strongest to weakest indicators. What other factors matter in an online help system?
Info architecture work that sometimes makes my head hurt
- Most info architects agree - planning for reuse is harder than conditional text. But even conditional text can be difficult, especially if there are multiple conditions that overlap. The winner of the “most conditional text” contest was this commenter on my talk.bmc post with 64 conditions in a FrameMaker document.
- Author-it has this to say about the business case that would make you think you need conditional text. Apparently you don’t need conditional text, with enough content chunking and reuse. I’m not sure I buy it so it makes my head hurt.
- I still struggle with topic authoring - but I’m finally “over” separating content from format. Whew! That only took a couple of years. This week I’m chunking of information using the rule of “seven plus or minus two.” That doesn’t usually make my head hurt, until I start coming up with all sorts of scenarios (maybe the user wants to set up their web site pricing for a DVD sale in the month of March!) and then I find myself writing too many topics.
- I also read Jon Udell’s great post about potential reasons why del.icio.us hasn’t really gone mainstream, Discovering versus teaching social information management. I think my own tag merging and pruning best practices need work. My favorite lines are from the comments, such as “people need to both realize that they can do that database query, and that they can refer to the results using a stable URL. I’m coming to believe that both those operations are still way beyond the capabilities of mainstream web users.”
- And finally, inline linking versus grouping links together. Usability studies and experts disagree on the correct way to link. I’m not sure I have the answers yet either. Better keep studying and linking.
What are some aspects of information architecture that are making your head hurt lately?
Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler, advocate for change
I’m listening in on Scott’s somewhat-famous Web 2.0 for technical communicators talk. He has given it 15 times this year already so I’m very excited to hear it here in Austin, TX at the Quadralay WebWorks RoundUp user conference. Here are my notes.
How can writers show they have highly transferable skills? What are the in demand skills?
information architecture, interaction design, modular content creation, localization and translation, document design, standards knowledge= document engineer (read Document Engineering by Robert J. Glushko and Tim McGrath). How to add value to our careers - by creating human- and machine-readable documents, whatever form they may take.
seeqpod.com - playable search engine. Files that exist and are playable. Does it actually look for keywords within podcasts and let you play the relevant portions of that podcast?
songsza.com
jott.com - what would you like to “jott” - automatic voice recording from your cell phone that can be played back.
tapefailure.com - clips of your users using your website - combine and compare patterns
tagging
del.icio.us - showing his list of tagged bookmarks at del.icio.us/abelsp.
Offered a case study of using for call centers using del.icio.us - have your call center people automatically add tags to items that make sense to them, then the techpubs department can see all the tags, the frequency of the items, and the different vocabulary words used for their bookmarking.
mashups
periodic table of visualization methods
simile.mit.edu/exhibit/ - how you can filter content from a web browser. See the value of visualizing data in more visual ways for the average user.
syndication, subscription
pipes.yahoo.com - visual editor for RSS feeds, bringing them together and combining them.
hosted software (Software as a Service or SaaS)
docs.google.com Google Docs & Spreadsheets (side note - I’ll be publishing my wiki talk from STC Austin using Google Docs’ Presentation tool)
thinkfree.com
zoho.com - documents, spradsheets, projects, notebook, planner, wiki, others
blogs
documentation teams or developers putting end-user doc onto blogs
wikis
interactive voice response company using wiki
parking meter company using wiki
Virgil Griffith created a wiki scanner - salacious edit site - looks for IP addresses and associates them with the company name.
DITA Storm - edit DITA pages on the web.
guided authoring - can developers write role-based documentation if they are guided to do so, with examples and guided templates so they know where content goes.
podcasts
video documentation
viddler.com - allows you to upload videos and annotate them.
See also video jug, expert village, sclipo, 5min, viewdo, teacher tube, youtube howto
social networks
linkedin.com - LinkedIn for Groups - STC and CM Pros will offer a member directory
Get his slides from slideshare.net.
The anti-social folksonomist
I’m finding that in del.icio.us I’m using keywords that no one else uses. Does this mean I’m an anti-social folksonomist?
This discovery reminds me that it’s important for findability to have tags that others will use too. On sites where popularity counts, it might be better to match others’ tags depending on what your end goal is - is your goal to categorize for your own easy retrieval later, or to tag so that others can see what you’ve tagged as being similar to their own findings?
For example, I use a tag called “blogthis” for items that have caught and held my interest but I don’t have time to immediately write a blog post about the item. Apparently no one else uses this tag! Or if they are using a “blogthis” tag, it’s those items aren’t shared.
Tagging is so easy, especially the way it’s implemented on sites like flickr and del.icio.us. But what conscious decisions are you making when you select a tag? This article has a good cognitive analysis of the act of tagging. To me, the lovely and freeing part about folksonomies for taxonomy is the decoupling of concerns about “matching” others tags and the ability to have multiple categories with similar meanings.
What does easy tagging mean for indexing professionals? Is it the crowdsourcing of indexing? Or is the printed book still a strong enough meme that a professional index is a requirement for certain media? Or is it a third, hybrid being, with identity and authority tied up in the tag selection?
Using the del.icio.us bookmarklet button
IE 7 is installed on my home computer (but not my work computer) and I recently wanted to add the del.icio.us bookmarklet button using del.icio.us’s instructions. However, in IE7, there is no View Toolbar as the nice tutorial shows (http://del.icio.us/help/video/ielinks) (which was made using Wink, which I have used in the past to make tutorials as well!)
So, instead, I used Google Toolbar to add it to my Google Toolbar, which strikes me as slightly odd, but IE7’s Settings dialog box led me to the Google Toolbar easier than an IE method of adding a button on their toolbar. Here are the steps I used.
- In IE 7, click Settings, and then click Options.
- Click the Buttons tab on the Toolbar Options dialog box.
- Click the Button Gallery Custom button and then click Add.
- You’ll go to this website: http://toolbar.google.com/buttons/gallery?hl=en and then do a search for del.icio.us.
There were two available buttons when I looked. Choose one of the buttons and Hey Presto, add it to your Google Toolbar so that a little square button appears.
Now, next time you’re on a page that you want to add to your del.icio.us bookmarks, you click the button in the toolbar and fill out the webform with notes, a description, and tags. Neato.
